Candide: Or Optimism (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Francois Voltaire

oct 2005 · Distribuido por Penguin

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"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"
 
It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this "optimism" concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the "all for the best" approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters, not to mention the questions of illness and man-made war. Moreover, as the rebel whose satiric genius had earned him not only international acclaim, but two stays in the Bastille, flogging, and exile, Voltaire knew personally what suffering entailed. In Candide he whisks his young hero and friends through a ludicrous variety of tortures, tragedies, and a reversal of fortune, in the company of Pangloss, a "metaphysico-theologo-comolo-nigologist" of unflinching optimism. The result is one of the glories of eighteenth-century satire.
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Voltaire, was born in 1694. For twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from Paris. In this, his most prolific period, he wrote such satirical tales as “Zadig” (1747) and “Candide” (1759). He died in 1778. Theo Cuffe translated Voltaire’s Micromégas and Other Short Fictions for Penguin Classics. Michael Wood is the writer and presenter of many critically acclaimed series on television, including In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great and its accompanying book.